There is an ever increasing demand for power conversion and regulation circuitry to operate with increased efficiency and reduced power to accommodate the continuous reduction in size of electronic devices. Switching regulators have been implemented as an efficient mechanism for providing a regulated output in power supplies. One such of regulator is known as a switching regulator or switching power supply, which controls the flow of power to a load by controlling the on and off duty-cycle of one or more switches coupled to the load. Many different classes of switching regulators exist today.
It is sometimes desirable to be able to monitor a magnitude of current that flows through the switches of a switching regulator. Some switching regulator integrated circuits (ICs) may incorporate additional input pins to accommodate an external sense resistor and/or associated sensing circuitry. Such methods thus are subject to additional cost and/or space to incorporate the additional input pins and the associated circuitry. Other switching regulator ICs may incorporate current-mirror transistors to mirror a portion of the current through the switches to monitor the magnitude of the current. However, such current-mirroring techniques are typically subject to inaccuracy that may result from non-linearity of the mirrored current.